Study of short-circuit robustness of p-GaN and cascode transistors

M. Landel (1) , C. Gautier (2) , S. Lefebvre (1)

1 SATIE - Systèmes et Applications des Technologies de l'Information et de l'Energie
2 Safran Tech

Short-circuit (SC) robustness is necessary for GaN adoption in industrial applications but continued efforts are needed to make them ready for real-world use. This work presents the results of >160 destructive tests performed on commercially available 600 V and 650 V GaN HEMT transistors from four different manufacturers with different structures (p-GaN and cascode). Under a DC-bus voltage of 400 V, the robustness is strongly dispersed: the Time To Failure (TTF) varies from hundreds of nanoseconds to hundreds of microseconds. But at a lower voltage (270 V), the TTF is generally in the millisecond range.

Keywords: GaN Short-circuit; Robustness; Short-circuit bench; Destructive test; Time to failure; Energy to failure

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Electric power; Electronics

M. Landel, C. Gautier, S. Lefebvre. Study of short-circuit robustness of p-GaN and cascode transistors. Microelectronics Reliability, 2022, 138, pp.1-5. ⟨10.1016/j.microrel.2022.114695⟩. ⟨hal-04073989⟩